That's the point, no one can tell you what the best choice is for you.
UNLESS you do a whole bunch of leg work first to determine what your
specific needs are. Then you will be able to make an intelligent choice.
Clearly Beverly's best choice was to use an off-the-shelf database. It might
not have been her favorite, but she evaluated her needs, her budget, and the
vendor provided options before she embarked on a data management project.

You'll need to do the same thing. I could tell you what my favorite package
is, but so what? If it didn't match your needs, you might very well hate it,
then you'd tell everyone that either I gave you bad advice or the vendor
provided a bad package. In reality your needs weren't met because you didn't
know what you wanted the software to do before you bought it.

--Diane Gutenkauf
(Standard disclaimer, really these ideas are mine and not my employer's or
those of any organization with which I am affiliated)

p.s. So Beverly are MAC users really sane :-)?

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999 15:33:48 -0500, Sally Cavins <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>OK, you have my attendtion - If you have a PC instead of a MAC what would
be the best choice????
>
>Beverly Balger wrote:
>
>> Diane,
>> Thanks for the very good explanation of the difference between data
>> bases and collections management systems.  I found it helpful and
>> interesting.
>>
>> One point of disagreement -
>>
>> >Why would any sane person want to spend so much time and energy
developing a
>> >system when there are very good systems already developed?
>>
>> I chose to hire someone to develop a database on FilemakerPro for me
>> because I work on a Mac.  While there are tons of wonderful options
>> for PCs, when I went to AAM in Cleveland and visited every vendor
>> there, there were exactly 2 options for us Mac users.  One system was
>> so well hidden that I couldn't find them (not reassuring when
>> thinking about future support) and the other got very bad reviews
>> from the users I polled.  Well, come to think of it there was a third
>> option, but no way is my small museum going to spend $20,000 on a
>> collections database.  One of the salespersons of the $20,000 system
>> took me aside and suggested I get FilemakerPro.


...snip...

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